He still books the same time

I went bald at twenty six. Not thinning. Gone by that Thanksgiving. Gino's had the same line since the day he started here and he runs it Tuesday and then runs it again Friday like nobody was in the room on Tuesday. Who cuts the barber's hair. Whole shop goes up. Tuesday and Friday, both.

I rent my chair. Two hundred a week, cash, Fridays, to my cousin Paulie who owns the building, so when the boiler quits there's nobody to call, there's just me going up the back stairs with a coffee to soften him first. Twenty five years on Broad Street. I do Paulie's voice so good his own mother stopped me at a christening to tell me to knock it off.

Everybody books through the app now. It texts them a day out and then again two hours out and they'll still come in at four fifty for a four thirty holding the phone up like the phone's on their side. You can set a deposit. There's a no-show fee sitting right there in the settings, twenty five percent, one switch. I've never turned it on and Paulie brings that up the same way he brings up the rent. There's a whole section in there for gift cards too. I've never once opened it.

Vin's a four thirty. Every other Wednesday, eleven years, and in eleven years the man has not moved it one time. Not for jury weeks. Couple winters back when they shut the 6/10 he came in with snow still sitting in his eyebrows.

He runs a window over at Garrahy. Filings. Something with filings, I don't know. I've had him in my chair three hundred times and I couldn't tell you his title. He knows my daughter's name and he's known it since she was eight. He knows which Paulie out of the four of them owns the building, which nobody outside the family ever gets right.

I do hair at a place on Cranston Street a couple times a month, for wakes. The family brings a picture on a phone and you work off that, and it's always a picture from a cookout in 2011. It's a different job than the chair. The room's cold. They run it that way on purpose.

I've got a compression sleeve on the right arm. I tell people tennis. Vin asked about it once, year three maybe, and I said tennis, and he said sure, and he's never asked again.

Vin. Hold on, the rent. Paulie put it to two twenty five in January and told me it was the taxes. Hey. Hey. Whaddaya want from me, I don't make the taxes. That's him. That's him exactly, ask his mother. He put it back in March and never said why he did either one.

Shop's closed Mondays. This past February his furnace went on a Sunday night, the whole house down to nothing, and he texted me Monday around ten asking could I do him that day because Wednesday he had something at four. I said where. Silver Lake, two family, he's got the downstairs and the top's been empty since his tenant went out to Johnston.

Brought the clippers over in a milk crate. He had the oven on with the door hanging open and one of those little space heaters aimed at a kitchen chair he'd dragged out to the middle of the floor, and he'd put a bath towel over his shoulders already. Kitchen was cold enough that I kept the sleeve pulled down over my wrist and it kept grabbing at the clipper cord, so every couple passes I'm stopping to unhook myself off my own arm. Anyway.

He's got a whorl at the crown that fights you and a scar behind the right ear off a bike when he was eleven. His old man had the same whorl. I did him over on Cranston Street, part on the left, the way the old guys like it where you can still see the comb lines in it. Twenty minutes, tops. That's all it takes.

I got there a little after one and I left a little after four, and somewhere in there we were on the floor in the front room with our coats still sitting on the kitchen chair.

Drove home down Cranston Street. Sat at the light by the armory through the whole green and the guy behind me leaned on the horn and I waved at him in the mirror like I knew him. There was hair on my sleeve. His hair.

Tuesday I opened at nine. Did the old guy who wants it exactly the same and then checks it in the hand mirror like I might have tried something. The two brothers from the towing place came in together the way they do. Gino ran his line at me before I had the cape on anybody. Somebody left a scarf on the coat hook that day and it's still hanging there.

Wednesday he was in the shop at four twenty six. Sitting by the window with his phone. I called him back and caped him and asked him tight on the sides or are we growing it, same as always, and he said what he says, and I cut his hair. Took twenty five minutes. Nobody in that room knew a thing.

He asked me about a Saturday one time. April, I want to say. Said something at work had his Wednesdays tied up for a stretch and could he come Saturday morning instead.

My daughter runs the front desk Saturdays. She's nineteen and she'll tell a fifty year old man to sit down and wait and he sits down and waits.

I told him Saturdays are full. They weren't full. He said no problem, took the Wednesday, which pushed him three weeks out from his last one.

He doesn't text me. Not once, not since that Monday in February, and I don't text him. The app does it. Tuesday night it sends me the next day's book and his name's down there between a four and a five where it's always been, and Wednesday he's in the chair with the cape on complaining about parking on Broad like the parking's my doing.

Last thing I do is the neck. Razor, and then a towel out of the steamer, hot enough that he sucks his teeth at me. He shuts his eyes for that part.